It looks like Taylor tried multiple times to buy the rights to her own catalog, and was always rebuffed by those with the power and control. And the CNN article was really spinning it as men bullying women, probably to rally the ‘feminist’ troops. I just think it brings up the question “what kind of world do we want to live in?” or “what kind of music business do we want to work in?” I understand acknowledging the reality “on the ground”. The leadership part tends to look at how to make things better, where possible.
Interesting thread. If I was just starting, I would hope to gravitate to the areas that at least gave you the best chance of supporting yourself, probably production.
As to leadership, I think good leaders learn what their people are capable of and how they work with others. From there it is trying to get the best performance you can out of each individual. Generally speaking, the leader is responsible for results, and the people he or she reports to don’t give style points if the results aren’t there.
It is always easier to fire the coach, not the team.
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I agree completely. My approach was always to try to put my folks in a position to be successful; “horses for courses” as the British colloquialism goes. That means the leader needs to know the traits of each person s/he is leading, in detail, and be able to recognize when to ask which people to help with what things. The line I had to tread was to respect that all “my” folks are highly self-motivated and do not need any supervision per se, because they all know exactly what is needed to do well in the science biz. So I describe my role as basically opening doors for them to charge through (or at least show them where the door is and just stand back).
My bad, I clearly gave the wrong impression (not all that elegant after all!). It is not necessarily true that those in management/leadership roles are paid more. Most civil servants are in the “general schedule” (GS) of grades, and yes higher grades get higher salaries. But fully half the civil servants in my group were the same grade as me, and had been for longer, so their salaries were higher than mine (until my time in service got to the point that I reached the same level). A better way to put it is that NASA really needs people who have the technical background to also step up to leadership roles so that they can lead from an informed perspective. Plugging in a generic NASA manager into the position I held at JSC would be pretty much a disaster; a big reason I could be effective is that my people knew full well that I was “one of them” in terms of understanding the needs and challenges of front line research science. Sorry for not making that more clear back at that lunch J!
NLeadership has its’ rewards and challenges. I managed salespeople and had to figure out how to keep them motivated to hit quotas. Some people are much more motivated than others, and you basically just need to keep them within the boundaries, while others need a lot more attention and reinforcement to get them to acceptable performance levels. All this while you, as the manager, have a GM expecting you to keep performing year over year miracles. The most important thing I learned was how hard it was to find good people, and how valuable they really are.
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??? That’s exactly what I meant, but apparently not what I wrote.
Wouldn’t this be almost the exact same thing as a film audio guy who’s thoroughly familiar with dialogue, ADR, re-recording, and foley being selected for a particular movie as the ‘head of audio post production’ or ‘audio post production lead’?
So basically there’s 1 guy keeping all of the different mixing studios and multiple post-production engineers in the loop and moving in the same direction to get the movie into the theaters when it needs to be.
My understanding of your term ‘intellectual leadership’ was like how a music director or conductor can be a horn player, keyboardist, violinist etc… it doesn’t matter as long as they possess the necessary awareness of the musical arts in general and can communicate adequately with the rest of the orchestra to keep everything coordinated. So the conductor seat in this case would requires a specialized leader - the more specialized the department, the more specific the leadership skills have to be. Did I completely mis-interpret this?
Nope, you got it right! But the original wording did deviate from this idea, at least to my eye. We’re in violent agreement. 